In many industries the prices of products, such as, for example, mass consumer goods, medicines, ophthalmic articles including contact lenses, etc., are affected to a non-negligible extent by the costs for their packaging for distribution to retailers, pharmacies, opticians, etc. In many cases packaging and logistics still involves a large amount of manual labor. Manual packaging and logistic processes of products and customer shipments usually is arduous, monotonous and involves a certain risk of mistakes. Mistakes lead to additional efforts for remedy and in particular for medicines or ophthalmic articles including contact lenses, they should be completely avoided.
Therefore, considerable attempts have been made to automate the packaging of products and product packages into shipment containers for distribution. These attempts have resulted in the introduction of pick-and-place robots in packaging lines. While such more or less automated packaging lines with pick-and-place robots have proven quite reliable for the packaging of large numbers of like products or product packages, they encounter considerable problems when shipment containers of different sizes must be loaded with different types of products and product packages. This is the case, for example, when an order of medicines must be prepared for shipment to a pharmacy or to a consumer. The problems also occur with orders related to ophthalmic products including contact lenses. For example, an order from an ophthalmologist or an optician may include a plurality of contact lenses having different parameters, such as refraction power of the lens, base curve, toricity, etc. Thus, each shipment container usually must be individually packaged with a specific selection of contact lenses having different parameters in accordance with the respective order. Taking further into account that each type of contact lens having the same set of parameters is not only provided in single lens packages but is typically also available in packages comprising multiple contact lenses of the respective type, it is apparent that the task of packaging a shipment container for distribution in accordance with a respective order is quite complicated to perform. Nevertheless, in view of the high volumes of shipments per day which typically must be completed by a distribution center, there exists a strong desire for an automatization of the packaging process.